


Betwixt

by inalasahl



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Episode: s07e22 Lost City (2), Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-11-12
Updated: 2007-11-12
Packaged: 2017-10-07 07:03:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/62631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inalasahl/pseuds/inalasahl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cameron, in the hospital.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Betwixt

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sixbeforelunch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixbeforelunch/gifts).



> I pinch-hitted this for the [Cameron Mitchell ficathon.](http://dirty-diana.livejournal.com/87036.html) The request was for Cam on a bad day during his recovery from the events of "Lost City." Speed-betaed by the wonderful Dirty Diana, long may she rein.

At night, the hospital was much louder than Cam needed it to be. It was also much too quiet during the day.

Cam had never been much of a reader, but the hospital library was a joke: eight copies of Valley of the Dolls, various Christian romances and The Yogi Berra Story were its _best_ offerings. Plus, the volunteer who brought magazines around once a week had refused to give him anything more interesting than Golf Digest ever since that time he'd given Cam a copy of the Sports: Illustrated swimsuit edition. Cam had forgotten to keep an eye on the clock for the regular chart notations. The nurse had gotten an eyeful, and then the volunteer had gotten an earful.

After the magazine incident, Cam had turned to getting his life in order, racking up an impressive list of outgoing calls, arranging for people to pick up his mail, cover his home in dust cloths and all that other stuff that needed to get done by someone even when you were in the hospital and your family lived in another state. He'd made a pretty good distraction out of that until they decided to move him into another room, one without an outgoing phone line. He'd felt he'd been pretty diplomatic, hewing closely to the rule smacked into his head by both grandmothers about never cursing in front of the opposite sex, but he guessed he must have kicked up a little more fuss than the hospital was comfortable with, because they'd sent an ogre in gabardine to have a talk with him.

It wasn't that Cam was a bad patient. It was just that he wasn't supposed to be there, and the hospital had no idea what to do with someone who was stabilized, able to care for himself and still there. Typically with injuries like Cam's, so long as you were able to sit up well enough not to fall out of a wheelchair, you got sent home with an honorable discharge and daily visits from a home health aid.

"Frankly," the ogre had said in crisp, pointed tones, "The government doesn't usually cover this."

He'd had some inkling before that strings might have been pulled. His PT had mentioned before how happy she was that for once her care recommendations hadn't been overridden at a higher level, but it hadn't seemed that important at the time. But now with the ogre glaring at him, threatening to question whether he still needed the level of care he was getting, he realized just how unsure he was of Colonel O'Neill's pull and willingness to continue to wait and hope that someday Cam might make a full recovery.

He'd gotten the message loud and clear: Behave or get sent home. Oh, sure, he wasn't injured anymore, not really. He was walking again, if you could call it that, though most days Cam thought of it as lumbering. Fit enough, anyway, to spend the rest of his life at a desk job. But that's not what Cam wanted. What he wanted was to be active duty fit, and that meant daily rehab and constant monitoring and eight surgeries (so far) to straighten out every twinge and twist, not twice-weekly outpatient visits at a smaller VA hospital with a steady influx of War on Terror vets and a PT who'd call his progress good so long as he still had all his limbs and the pain stayed at a nice steady five on the one-to-ten scale.

It's not that he wanted to be difficult and in the way, but he literally had nothing to do other than lie around and watch television, and Cam Mitchell simply wasn't the lying around type. After a month his visitors had dwindled to an irregular trickle, and even though his parents called every day, he didn't have much to say to them anyway.

So Cam had decided to take the ogre's advice and focus even more on his recovery (she probably meant for him to rest more, but it wasn't Cam's fault he wasn't fluent in Ogre), which had led to the present disaster. His PT had approved regular "walks" (15-lap increments around the nurses' station that Cam always "accidentally" miscounted until one of the nurses noticed). It was just Cam's luck that one of his fellow patients had gotten a visit from a rather rambunctious conglomerate of nieces and nephews who had managed to slip away from their parents and roust up a couple of wheelchairs to race down the hall. The crash was spectacular; the pain more so, but Cam was sure he'd rather grin and bear it than spend the next few days in bed too doped up even to make predictions about who was going to turn out to be the baby daddy on the next Maury.

He would have gotten away with it, too, had his recovery not been going so well so far.

"I think you're ready for something new," his PT had said with a smile as the session started.

"You want me to skip," Cam stated flatly. "What does this "

" have to do with getting back to active duty?" She looked taken aback, no doubt she'd expected him to be happy with what would have been an enormous gift just two days ago. She patted his hand. "It's a military thing, isn't it? Asking the same question every time a new skill is introduced generates an atmosphere of comfortable routine. I do it myself sometimes." It's true that Cam had asked her that question many times, but in the past it had always been aimed at getting her to push him a little more, not rein him in. The befuddlement on her face told him he'd better make this good.

"I'm just goal-oriented, Doc," he said. "Like to know I'm getting results as efficiently as possible."

"Most other patients, I'd ... skip it," she said. "But you've managed to get the right people to sign off on the extra PT. And you're determined to go back to active duty. That requires a more extensive musculoskeletal skill set. Walking's easy," she said. "Walking as if you'd never been injured? Running, kneeling, squatting, crawling: There are a lot of ways that people use their legs that aren't just about putting one foot in front of the other. Human beings are complex machines."

Cam lifted himself up to attempt the bounce-hop required of skipping and came down harder than he expected, with a sudden wrench to his knee that caused him to gasp and fall over. "Cameron?" the PT asked, kneeling down next to him. He stared at his hand without answering. "Cameron!"

He shook himself a bit, and looked at her. "I'm okay," he said, blinking slowly. "I mean, my knee hurts like hell, but I'm fine."

"You're not fine," she said. "You've got to stop pushing yourself like this. I've had impatient clients before, but not when they were as serious about their recovery as you claim to be."

He could have stood a lecture; it was the test results that were going to break him. "We believe you've strained your right anterior cruciate ligament, but not torn it, thank goodness. As it is, it's a difficult injury to treat with a high occurrence of re-injury," his doctor said. "I can no longer be positive that given the right treatment, you'll be able to make a full recovery."

When they moved him back into the room with the outgoing phone, it hardly seemed like much of consolation.

For four days Cam didn't give the nurses any trouble, his eyes barely flickering as they came in on their daily rounds making the same chart notation each time: "hopelessness, r/t long-term stress." On the fourth day, Samantha Carter visited. She'd been stopping by whenever she was in town. On the fifth day, two off-base uniforms came in weighted down with triple-locked briefcases, giving the entire staff dire warnings about security breaches that caused them to bristle. They were all in the same Air Force, weren't they, and knew better than to snoop?

And when the next nurse went in to his room, she was happy to note that he looked up from the thick binder sitting on his tray table and smiled. He handed her his television remote. "I think the batteries are dead."

"I'll see that you get some new ones."

"Don't bother," he said. "I'm reading."

Finis

**Author's Note:**

> Rated for suggestive themes.


End file.
